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Assimilating Woman to Man: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 14, 1858

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ASSIMILATING WOMAN TO MAN: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 14 MAY 1858
New York Morning Express 15 May 1858 and New York Times, 15 May 1858. Another text in New York Evening Express, 15 May 1858.
The annual National Woman’s Rights Convention, presided over by Susan B. Anthony, assembled in New York City’s Mozart Hall on 13-14 May 1858. Among the speakers and delegates were Ernestine L. Rose, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Grimké, and Sarah Parker Remond. Exchanges between platform speakers and several men in the audience, including a “well hen-pecked" husband, over the proper rights and duties of each sex occupied much of the morning session on the second day. Despite a call for a dinner recess, the audience prevailed upon Douglass, who had attended the previous day's session, to speak. His brief remarks echoed sentiments earlier endorsed at the convention by the Reverend Antoinette L. Brown and Lucy Stone. New York Times, 14 May 1858; New York Daily Tribune, 14 May 1858; New York Herald, 14 May 1858.
Loud calls were made for “Douglass,” when Fred. Douglass took the stand, and delivered a speech in behalf of woman’s rights. Having experienced slavery in his own person, it was impossible that he could be indifferent to any call for freedom. He based the rights of woman to freedom and to equality with man upon the same grounds on which he advocated the right of the slave to freedom and equality with the white race. (The only difficulty that, in his opinion, existed anywhere in relation to this question was one that arose less out of the idea of rights than out of the idea of duties, or the idea of the possibilities of woman. What could woman do? had been asked and answered generally, but he was inclined to think that woman herself was uneducated in a fuller notion of what she could do.)1From the New York Times, 15 May 1858. He believed a woman could do anything a man could do, and by so doing could assimilate herself to man. If she handled the grubbing hoe instead of the needle her hands would become large and horny just as men’s hands do. There was no inherent principle of beauty in woman more than in man, for if they were to change places man would assume all that delicate texture of skin and beauty which woman has in her present position. He advocated the carrying out of the woman‘s rights idea among the poorer classes, and instanced the fact of a man now building a house who was assisted by his wife in laying the bricks, splitting the wood, &c., and in such cases he saw

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the same hard features, hands, &c., both in man and woman. On the plantation a woman was expected to hoe as many rows in a day as a man, and in consequence acquired physical strength and health; therefore a woman need not be afraid to go out West, for nature would furnish her gloves of steel as well as the man. Let women go out there and do as in England, where the finest women, in his estimation, were working in the field.

Creator

Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895

Date

1858-05-14

Publisher

Yale University Press 1985

Type

Speeches

Publication Status

Published